Bhutan: Hand in hand with the gods of the Himalayas

BEHIND a circular 17th-century watchtower several hundred feet above the Paro Valley, 23 fully laden ponies were just heading off as we arrived with our embarrassingly light day bags. Alongside the packhorses, the entire human population of Bhutan seemed to have assembled to act as guides, cooks and horsemen to our trekking party of 11.

Beneath me, the banks of the Paro River were a swirling mandala of wheat fields ripe for harvesting. At the head of the valley, beside darker swathes where radishes, cabbages and pumpkins were growing, the daily Druk Air 72-seater Bae 146 jet was making a final approach, almost shaving a mountain as it did so. The world's smallest national carrier - with a fleet of two - had just given another batch of passengers the flight of their lives, taking them within a whisker of the Himalaya's mightiest peaks.

When the first plane was being delivered in 1983, the Bhutanese authorities requested that it make a detour for purification by Buddhist monks. This was deemed necessary because Aerospace, its maker, also built warplanes. In this country, religion is at the heart of daily life, not an adjunct to it.

Until the 1960s, the feudal enclave of Bhutan had no telephones, schools, hospitals, postal service or even a national currency. Foreign holidaymakers were only admitted in 1974 and today fewer than 6,000 tourists a year pay a hefty $200 a day each for the privilege of visiting the country, thus maximising revenue while minimising the impact on the local culture.

Our route between Paro and the capital, Thimphu, followed a trail of stupas - holy stone monuments known in Bhutan as chorten - erected in memory of an eminent lama to ward off evil spirits at dangerous points on the trail. It had consequently been the route traditionally trodden by royalty and peasant alike.

Over the next five days we tracked the Himalayan switchback across a religion-drenched mountain landscape. Throughout our journey the sky was a a preposterous blue, and the dramatic views changed constantly as we passed from rhododendron forest to high alpine meadow, to glittering tarn above the tree line, where we would catch glimpses of the white peaks of Bhutan's highest mountains, Chomolhari (7,313m) and Gangkar Punsum (7,497m). On the way, we camped in yak enclosures and were invited into several dzongs - fortified monasteries - by young, barefoot monks clad in claret robes and sandalwood beads.

As we walked, I discovered a little of my fellow walkers' lives: Tom, retired at 40 and then again at 51 ("I made and spent a fortune and so had to go back and make another one"); Roger, in his sixties, repeating a trek he had made five years ago with his wife before her sudden death; our group leader, John Earle, 69, returning - with a new steel knee - to the Himalayas he had first trekked in Nepal in the 1960s.

Our hosts' lives were even more intriguing. A couple of the horsemen were Tibetans who had fled their homeland when the Chinese invaded. One of the guides, Rinchon, had once been a masked dancer.

Each day we walked six or seven hours. Rhododendron and primordial forest dressed in spongy moss gave way to edelweiss, gentian and alpine juniper; we all agreed that it was among the finest mountain scenery on earth. There were, however, grumbles. Although the trek was described as moderate, a number of the first-timers found the ascent a little too abrupt, giving them insufficient time to properly acclimatise. Consequently, for the first few days, headaches and sleeplessness travelled with us up the mountains.

The other major frustration was that there was no one accompanying us who could illuminate what we were seeing. John Earle had never been to Bhutan before (which raised the question as to why he was group leader), and Sanjay Dorji and Wangdi, our trek leaders, spoke limited English.

Such reservations, however, seemed somehow churlish alongside our overwhelming sense of good fortune at simply being there. Several months after my return, I still have vivid memories of our experiences along the trail: Rinchen performing his demon dance with pony bells round his neck in a field awash with pink Cosmos; the deafening, desolate silence of Phajoding Air Burial site where the bodies of children who have died are put out for the vultures to eat - the locals believe that in this way the dead attain instant reincarnation; the billowing incense and droning mantras of the monasteries.

Several of my indelible memories involve Roger. Just before lunch on our first day, he disappeared into a large wooden farmhouse with an open attic hay loft surmounted by a flat tin roof on which chillies were drying (80 per cent of the country is dependent on farming). Aubergines and peppers hung from a brightly painted window. Beside it a row of butter lamps stood in an alcove above three sleeping dogs. Through the doorway I noticed a woman fetch something for Roger, who soon reappeared sporting a necklace of yak cheese he had bought for 30p. It looked like nougat and proved just as chewy.

On another occasion, just as we were about to leave the whitewashed courtyard of a fortified monastery to the resident cockerel, the caretaker - as old as Methuselah, with a face composed of sunbaked gullies - turned up and fumbled for the temple key in an acacia bush. As he showed us into the inner sanctum, Roger produced a picture of the Dalai Lama (Bhutan is the last Tibetan Buddhist kingdom on earth), which the caretaker gratefully added to an altar already congested with Buddhas, copper horns and butter lamps. Although clearly thankful, our host declined to have his picture taken. Wangdi explained: "He believes a photograph will steal his strength and sickness will follow."

Animism and superstition are as deeply embedded in the Bhutanese psyche as Buddhism. When he was a small boy, Wangdi admitted, he was terrified of leaving his home during the construction of a new dzong, for it was commonly believed that a monastery needed a child's head built into its foundation to ensure its longevity. His mother, he told me, had "died of a curse" at 56, while his grandmother, having encountered a propitious yeti as a young girl when out collecting mushrooms ("It was 5ft tall, hairy, human-looking and smelt strongly of dung and the earth"), had already survived well into her eighties.

One day, when again we found ourselves sharing a path, I momentarily thought our universes were about to coincide when Wangdi, seeing a fellow trekker light up, confessed to a dislike of cigarettes. I told him I, too, had had an aversion since giving up the weed 20 years earlier. "It's bad, very bad," Wangdi continued, as he swept back some old man's beard dripping from a cypress like dreadlocks. "How can anyone do anything so harmful to the gods?"

For Wangdi the gods were a physical presence who had no escape from the polluted atmosphere created by man. Wangdi was similarly against spitting, not because it was impolite but because "it can drown and kill small insects".

It was Wangdi who had the greatest adventure on our trek when, trying to re-find our path one day in a forest, he encountered a black bear and its two cubs drinking by a stream.

Often, Wangdi sang as we walked. Just as often, John Earle declaimed Tennyson while beating out time with each step. When we finally reached camp, strong tea would be awaiting us.

In the mornings, I would sometimes wake to find the water in my bottle frozen, but soon the sun would warm up waterbottles, tents and limbs. Mark, at 32 the youngest in the group and on his first trek, would be talking excitedly into his dictaphone. Beside the campfire, Elizabeth and Guido would be exchanging tales of their Tanzanian and Egyptian childhoods over porridge, and David would be pulling up a stool to join them, having just returned from an early hike to a lookout crag. Tom, meanwhile, who didn't sleep well, would be grumpily arguing the toss with anyone about anything.

On our final night, camped high above Thimphu Valley, I sat watching the lights of the capital, more village than city, flickering below. One was missing. The capital's only traffic light had recently been removed because of confusion and lack of traffic.

Somewhere below me I could hear the incessant rush of a river. The rest of the party were either playing Scrabble, polishing off the final dregs of a bottle of local rum provided by Sanjay, or taking it in turns to read poems from Roger's anthology. The crew, meanwhile, were creating a puppet silhouette show on the side of the mess tent. Bells chimed as the ponies grazed. Up in the sky the gods watched and listened.

Getting there Paul Gogarty's trek was part of a 19-day tour of Bhutan with Himalayan Kingdoms (0117 923 7163), which costs £2,895, including flights, transfers and most meals. He flew to Delhi courtesy of United Airlines (0845 844 4777).

Best guidebookBhutan, by Stan Armington (Lonely Planet, £12.99). Best time to go: mid-March to early June and September to October. Monsoon time is July to September.